Painted red and bleeding
by ohmygodwritersblock
Summary: AU in which Sherlock, all throughout his life, paints a man he's never met. Soulmate AU, if you want to see it that way.
1. Chapter 1

He can see him, this man.

He's small, short, but definition raises lines of muscle across his biceps, and his eyes - blue, like ice, and the flame of a bunsen burner, and the sky that watches between the tips of trees in the forest - are warm and warning. Pieces of him have emerged over the years, different stages of life, snapshots that don't quite fit together.

The fingers take shape the most often, coming to life with slow arches of Sherlock's wrist and quick flicks of the pencil, round and sturdy, sure, with short nails. They're practical fingers, and when he blinks, on occasion, color reveals itself and soft shades pull the lines to life, sometimes stemming into round knuckles and other times callused palms. There are the hands of a child, small and wide and soft with the fullness of a life and they grip things like a woman's painted nail or the sheen of a plastic cup. There are the hands of an adult, strong and sturdy and these appear in loose curls of sleep or tangled in long ginger hair or clenched tight around the biting strength of a gun and then once or twice, Sherlock has watched as he has streaked those hands with blood from the bristles of his smooth brush.

The brightness behind his eyes, the forms and the etchings that reveal themselves, whisper at the insides of his mind until he picks up a pen, a pencil, a paintbrush, or sinks his hands into the slick drag of clay. The call to be created. Voiced, shown.

Sherlock translates everything word for word, every curve of the pencil is the trace of its original.

Once, after watching his flesh part for the press of a needle, after blinking at nothing and just barely managing to wipe the slide of drool from the corner of his mouth, he added his own needle to the grasp of this man's hand. It was crude and drooping and the solid needle collided with the sloppy feathered lines of its echo and paper skidded apart as Sherlock's knuckles went white with strain and the point of the needle made a sawdust scar in the dark surface of the table.

Later, he burnt it and the paint made the flame blue like the sea over tanned feet and green like swimming pools in the summer months against the shock of bright armbands supporting chubby arms.

There is no correlation between Sherlock's moods and what he draws. Thundering tantrums can be shed by the bright curve of lips, a smile rolling at the corners. Drifting content is marred by the handprint of a slap against a peachfuzz cheek, or a gun pressed against skin that could part and flesh that could rip.

It breaks him sometimes.

And sometimes it folds itself into the cavity of his chest and gives him air to breathe, keeps his eyes open and his hands steady. Keeps his mind from fraying too much at its edges.

But it can't do that for too long.

Sometimes he aches and doesn't cry. Doesn't cry.

Instead he closes his eyes and nothing comes.


	2. Chapter 2

**Sorry.**

* * *

He paints a lot when he's high, when the blood swims, rushing just under the pale nothing of his skin.

The lines are looser or sharper, depending on what is sparking his veins.

Acrylic smudges across the palms of his hands and flakes between his knuckles. He clenches and unclenches his fingers and watches his wrists, nails, the ridges that roll as his hands curl, as they smudge with purple ink from leaking pen nibs, the dark made bright against the translucence of his skin. And he paints in the etchings of Victor Trevor as well, fingers slipping over skin, smoothed by colored fingers, mouth tracing the lines left by all five along the column of a neck. Along his jaw, a drag of his thumb over lips. Purple, yellow, green. Orange swept across his brow, blue over the plush of his lips. Everything is burning with the poison of paint scenting the air, and the slide and slap of color between them.

He's not the man, but Sherlock tries to fill him in.

Tries to paint him so he fits.

Victor always showers afterwards, and Sherlock doesn't watch him as his hips swing around the door to the bathroom, sometimes green, sometimes red, sometimes a blur of nothing, as he hums, as the layers of color splatter and run in the wet steam of the shower, already marred by sweat and the slick press of bodies.

Sherlock doesn't watch him as he towels the dark brush of his hair, as he covers himself up, tucks away the canvas of his body.

The sheets are a mess, purple and green and brown and blue and yellow acrylic dry into the fabric and mould themselves to the streaks of Sherlock's limbs. He stays there for hours watching the blank of the ceiling. He paints the man over and over again, new parts every time the paint dries. He fills in his lines and makes himself with the layers.

Later, after showers and showers and skin painted pink only from scrubbing, he steps around the drying paint of the man spread out in smudges on the floor. Two dimensional, too many colors. Where tanned skin should be, are hues of green and pink. The camouflage of his rifle and his clothes is brown and burgundy and the middle color of fire just before it dies. The blood though, the blood is still red. It soaks through the fabric, running and smudging with too much water and drying in swirls of muddied brightness. The blood starts from his shoulder and has spread down an arm, over his chest, staining both the man's uniform as he gasps, and at the same time, spilling onto the the splintering plywood that carpets Sherlock's concrete floor.

The pads of Sherlock's fingers are still beading blood now, skin rough around the scrape and paint hanging on the dying cells, spikes of wood making him sigh every time they dig further into him.

Sherlock doesn't clean the floor or the sheets for three days. When he does, they're both stained and the ceiling still looks the same.

* * *

**Hey everyone. I'm feeling really, really terrible today. Really terrible.**

**I actually started crying. I don't think that I've ever just started crying for no reason except for just generally feeling terrible. I don't really cry. So yeah.**

**Sorry. To like, push this towards you. I hope I'm not bringing you down. I hope you have a wonderful day, and you're wonderful (even if you don't like the story, you're still wonderful).**

**Thank you. xxx**

**(and I'm not sure that this part even makes sense, maybe none of it makes sense)**


	3. Chapter 3

**So hi. I haven't posted anything for weeks (no wifi over half term and then I left my laptop in a different country and it only arrived yesterday) soooo. Hi again!**

* * *

He doesn't want to do anything with his life, he decides.

So he walks out of his rent-by-the-week flat on a Thursday afternoon, paint still a mottled skin against the walls, strokes of his brush and silver trails of his pencil so interlocked that they no longer form shapes.

He has a bag in one hand, clothes, toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, drugs. Its a woman's purse. Brown, wide. The straps are some kind of faux leather.

In his other hand, he has his art supplies.

And he walks.

New York is big.

He's been living in it for months but he hasn't known.

And the people, the people are wonderful. They glare at him when he walks to close and they wear (just for him, perhaps) their stories across their upper lips. In a grin, in the stubble left there, in the nick of a knife scar.

Their lipstick color, their chapstick, their pout.

And these people, moving in chaos, in tandem. Why don't they see.

Why don't they rip, like carefully chosen fabric they cover themselves with, like the hair from their legs, their arms, their upper lip, why don't they rip away the social boundaries that keep them moving the way they do. Like a train on tracks. Forging ahead, behind.

That man, that man there with the rucksack. Hunched, facial hair straggling slowly in scribbles across his weak chin, rounded cheeks. His hands, dark even against the pale wood of his accordion, move a little too slowly.

He could punch that woman in the face. He could throw her to the ground and snap her neck and take her money, and her dog. He could lick across her slack lips, taste the color of her makeup (charmer 19 - applied with too many layers).

He could.

But he won't.

That girl there, long dark hair and sharp features. Late teens.

She could just start singing. Sing anything she likes at the top of her lungs and then kiss the breath from the girl beside her.

She could do it.

But she won't.

So Sherlock gets on a train to Toronto. He gets out his notebook and draws and draws and draws. The man beside him just learned how to juggle and his wife is mute. After six pages of small, detailed studies of the man behind his eyes, Sherlock runs out of images. No more.

So he angles his body to show the man beside him his drawings a little more clearly. The man compliments him profusely and Sherlock closes his eyes and draws the wife perfectly from the image of her that he saw in the folded brown wallet as a ticket was produced for the collector.

When asked, he is psychic.

He is paid for the drawing and asked to sign it. Sherlock has never been asked to sign anything in his entire life (except for Victor Trevor's left hipbone and that doesn't count, he was fishing too hard for commitment). So he does. He signs it in the bottom left hand corner and the man slots it into his bag and they don't speak after that.

Eventually Sherlock gets bored and finds someone to have sex with in the loo.

Toronto is big too. He walks. And takes the bus. And walks. And hitches a ride with a woman in her sixties. The car has no roof (a 'happy accident' she said cheerfully) and flowers duct taped to the doors. Halfway through the journey a yellow pheasants eye snaps off halfway up its stem and gets crushed behind him on the road.

Sherlock laughs a little, under his breath, and when he gets out of the car, he doesn't tell her that she has 8 months to live.

She'll know in three days anyway, unless her doctor is completely incompetent.

On the edge of the roadmap, he stands on the side of a dirt path and waits for a bus to come along.

A bus does pull up, white, dirty, but spacious. When he gets in, the man with the exposed beer belly and red pointed hat on his head gestures loosely to the gathering of forty-somethings in the back and he tells him yes, he'll come with them to the Auto Show. They smoke until their limbs are veiled and when Sherlock is asked if he's a fag the only reaction to his affirmative answer is does he dress up as a woman.

Sherlock says sometimes and then he draws feet, toes crossed, against a couch cushion and doesn't join in when they all start to sing because he doesn't know the words.

* * *

**So is this plot?**

**No?**

**Yes?**

**Maybe?**

**Honestly I have no idea this just kind of happened. **

**I know its a little different to the original tone of the story but like Painted Red and Bleeding is kind of a stream of consciousness story for me in a way. So I just write and post it and some of you guys like it (which I am really excited about actually) and so it was always gonna be a little weird. The lady with the yellow car is based off of my friends dad who has a car like it (with a little air horn and yellow and white striped towels over the windows) I kid you not. **

**The white bus was actually a white van full of those guys that drove by a restaurant that I was eating at once. One of them was playing a ukelele and another had a giraffe hat on and they kinda looked like they had it all figured out, you know?**

**So I hope that was vaguely interesting. More of this? Less of this? Shut up about this piece of crap and update my other stories? **

**Let me know please. xxx**


	4. Chapter 4

**So basically the formatting on chrome is terrible. So sorry about that, if you read this before. It was a wall of text that didn't make much sense.**

**QUICK WARNING**

******This chapter has sex in it, but its basically non-explicit. You could pretend they have clothes on if you really wanted to. **

* * *

"When we get there," he whispers into the curve of Sherlock's neck, into the skin wet with slow bites and the rough press of begging lips, "When we get there," he says again, and Sherlock sighs into the air around them, thick with the scent of their bodies pushing together. Sherlock doesn't comment on the repetition of the phrase because he's losing his mind too.

"When we get there," Sherlock chokes into the air, eyes hazy lidded and low.

"Mmm," he says, curving his back to lave his tongue across the wide expanse of Sherlock's chest, to pull over the muscles working under the skin tinted dark by too much sun.

He drags hot, dark kisses the color of caramelized sunlight and umber over the dark stain of red and the sheen of sweat over Sherlock's cheeks.

"It will be sunny there, too," he promises, and Sherlock doesn't care about the sun. He doesn't. Its London he wants, with thin-faced buildings and dark, drifting clouds. But he gasps anyway, when the drag and press is almost too much, and more promises fall from the red pout of lips, "And warm, so fucking warm," he bites the words and they bruise teeth marks into the blank of his skin and they stay there.

Sherlock groans, "Yes," until it is just a mess of a thousand syllables all over his tongue.

"And I'll take such good care of you."

"Yes."

Thrust-slap-moan.

"And it will be so hot that you can- fuck- you can lie around naked."

"Yes-" gasp. Thrust-slap-moan.

"And you'll be so fucking- beautiful, and you can paint the sunsets for me. Please? Please. Please."

"Yes."

"When we get there."

"Yes."

"When we get there."

"Yes."

"Mine."

Thrust-slap-moan.

Sherlock wakes at seven minutes past four in the morning. He showers, and dresses. He paints a sunset in the darkness against the slow warmth of the day edging between linen shades over the windows. He paints the sunset over a bay somewhere in the south of Spain and he leaves.

He doesn't go to London. Its been a month here in Texas, but his brother is in London.

He takes $300 from under Charlie's mattress and catches a bus to somewhere new.

He paints the Man at the age of fifteen on the side of a camper van somewhere, a day's ride from that tiny apartment where he left a sunset. Half a face, left eye wide, blue. Mouth pressed tight. Waiting? Wanting?

Sherlock doesn't know.

It doesn't really matter.

He shoots up in the back of that van.

He watches the needle point part his flesh and his skin and he sighs. There are too many days in the week and too many hours and there is just too much time between now and whenever he dies and so he breathes.

Lungs(2...3…). Lungs (2...3...). He counts the breaths. Inhales. Exhales.

He wonders if the colors of the sky matter. And if they did (which he knows they don't but he's spiraling now) who would be in charge of them. Because everything with purpose must be guided.

And then Sherlock wanders on.

* * *

**"Who is Charlie?" I hear you ask.**

**"I HAVE NO IDEA!" I say.**

**He's some guy that fell in love with Sherlock and wanted to travel the world with him. And keep him.**

**And Sherlock wasn't super into that. **

******Also, I was looking for a beta earlier today and just gave up because I couldn't really find one that suited me. They all seem to be about correcting grammar and spelling and while that's really good, I don't feel like I need to focus on that quite as much. I kind of want someone who can help me with the flow of the story. Paragraphing, word choice. I want someone who can offer constructive criticism (like, take that whole paragraph out you really don't need it. or... this entire chapter needs to go in a different direction) and someone who is more focused on description and narrative. **

******Okay so rant over. And also if you know anyone...? Or you are someone who that could do something like that. Even if you don't actually beta.**

******SO WHAT DID YOU THINK?**


End file.
